How to Save a Life
by justanotherclassic
Summary: "You were like coming up for fresh air. It's like I was drowning and you saved me." CS Grey's Anatomy AU
1. The Girl in the Bar

It's a terrible idea to drink the night before starting a new job, but Emma Swan finds herself wandering into a bar called The Rabbit Hole anyway, intent on finding a way to calm her nerves and escape the stillness of her too-quiet apartment.

The bar is loud, teeming with patrons drinking and laughing, taking turns playing darts or shooting pool. Despite the number of people in the bar, the bartender – a small, portly man wearing a red toboggan hat – is quick to deliver her drink.

"Rum is my drink of choice, as well," comes an accented voice to her left.

Emma looks over just in time to notice a man sidle up next to her. He's the picture of 'tall, dark, and handsome', with his hair an artful mess, his scruff well-manicured, and his eyes twinkling with promise. It would be a terrible decision to continue talking to him, to entertain his small talk until one of them suggests heading home and they inevitably fall into bed with one another. But tonight seems to be a night to make terrible decision, so Emma takes a sip of rum and smiles at the man.

"Well, why don't you order one and sit for awhile?"

-/-

Emma insists on no names, and he doesn't seem to mind, because hey, he's getting laid. He takes her back to his apartment, where they don't even make it to the bed. Instead, the stumble over and onto the couch, not even bothering to remove to her jacket.

"I like the red leather jacket," he mouths against the column of her throat. Any teasing response she has is lost when his fingers slide under the waistband of her panties, and he thumbs at her clit.

Eventually, they end up in his bed. She rides him, reveling in the slow drag of him inside of her. He grips at her hips, and she knows she will have bruises in the morning. Emma finds she doesn't care. Later, after they are both sated and exhausted, he tries to hold her, but she pulls away.

"You can stay, you know," he offers as she climbs out of the bed to retrieve her clothing.

"I have work in the morning," she replies, ignoring how enticing he looks sprawled out in his bed.

"So do I, but that doesn't mean we can't continue the fun before breakfast." He leers at her then, his expression full of promise as flashes from the previous few hours flash before her eyes.

"Sorry, buddy, but this was a one-time thing."

It's always a one-time thing. It's how she operates.

Without so much as a kiss goodbye, Emma leaves.

-/-

Barely five hours after leaving bar guy's apartment, Emma pulls her yellow bug into the hospital's parking lot. It's the first day of her internship, and she's eager for this new chapter of her career to begin, to finally be called 'Dr. Swan' and take the last few steps required to become a surgeon.

She's proud of herself for making it this far, terrified too. Who would have thought that the baby left on the side of the road, the one who grew up into a kid that no one wanted, would go on to graduate top of her medical school class and land an internship at one of the most prestigious programs in the nation?

Emma takes a deep breath. She's ready. Or so she thinks she is.

-/-

"So who did you get as your resident?" A perky brunette with a pixie cut asks as Emma attempts to stuff her jacket into her locker. "I have Regina Mills."

"Um, same."

"Ooooh, you have the Evil Queen!" A male voice calls out from somewhere behind her. "Sucks to be you!"

"Wait, Evil Queen?" The perky woman who had started the question looked somewhat uneasy at the revelation. "Why would anyone call her the Evil Queen?"

"From what I hear, she's hell on wheels. I guess because her mom runs the hospital and is, you know, the greatest living Cardiothoracic surgeon, she feels entitled to treat everyone like her peasants," a different intern explains with a shrug. "Anyway, don't fuck up, or it's off with your heads."

Emma tries her best to ignore the burst of apprehension knotting in her gut.

-/-

Whether or not she is a queen, Regina carries herself as if she is one. When she summons Emma and her fellow assigned interns, she practically commands the attention of everyone else mingling or working in the hallway. It's equal parts inspiring and terrifying.

"Now, I have five rules," she begins with an unerring smile on her face. "Number One, there is no point in sucking up to me. You're interns. I already hate you, and I doubt that will change. I do hope you're memorizing this."

Regina appraises the group before continuing on with her rules, each becoming more insane than the last. Now that Emma is more awake and slightly less overwhelmed, the name Mills rings a bell. Cora Mills, Chief of Surgery at the hospital, had blazed trails early on as a female surgeon back in the day, shattering glass ceilings and saving hearts, earning her the nickname the "Queen of Hearts." It seems Regina has carried on that legacy.

Emma doesn't have a legacy to lean on. She doesn't have a legacy for anything, except for maybe being abandoned. She wonders how it feels to be in Regina's shoes, to have a mother, a legacy, a history to hold onto.

But the Regina's pager buzzes, and they rush off to save someone's life.

-/-

It's a girl, and she's having seizures and no one knows why. Emma takes her to get a CT scan, but gets lost somewhere along the way. She's a doctor, she has multiple degrees, but she can't find her way around the hospital. It's embarrassing, which is what the girl says, and Emma can't help be silently agree.

Eventually the tests come back and the parents have questions that Emma doesn't know how to answer. It's her first day, and though she's had training – she's a doctor, you know – she doesn't want to say the wrong thing.

"What do I do?" she asks Regina, who gives her the most put-upon look in response.

"You go find your attending, Dr. Jones," Regina tells her, exasperation evident in her voice. "He's just down that hallway."

So Emma goes out in search of Dr. Jones, and the she sees _him_. And he sees _her_.

Fuck.

-/-

She's hiding in the stairwell, doing her very best to prevent a panic attack, when he finds her. He's wearing a bemused sort of expression, and Emma wants to yell "how can you be so blasé about this?" because he's an attending and she's an intern, making him more or less one of her bosses – and she fucked him.

"Hello there, love."

"Not your love," she replies, and the words come out harsher than she imagined. But this is bad, and she has every right to be a little bit standoffish.

"You didn't mind me calling you that last night."

"Last night, I didn't know you were my attending." She huffs even as he sways into her space. He smells the same way he did last night, of spice and leather, and she tries not to wonder how he gets the leather smell to stick despite wearing scrubs. "You should have told me you were a doctor."

He shrugs. "You're the one who insisted on no personal details, what is it, oh, Doctor Swan. Swan, that's a lovely name. I wish I had known it last night."

"Can we not talk about last night?" Emma groans. This can't be happening, she thinks. There is no way this is happening. "How about we instead talk about the case? Wendy Darling, grand mal seizures, needs a neuro consult?"

"Good thing I'm a neurosurgeon then, right, love?"

He has the audacity to wink at her before whisking out of the stairwell and toward Wendy Darling's room.

"This is going to be terrible," she sighs.

-/-

Later, after chasing after Dr. Jones, and spending a few hours doing scut, she joins her fellow interns for a late lunch, despite not having an appetite of which to speak. Emma has never really been great at the whole 'making friends' thing, but she's willing to try, and with this mess with Dr. Jones hanging over her head, she knows she might need them. Her table conversing about Regina Mills when Emma sits down, their gossip learned from nurses spoken in hushed whispers over their sandwiches in salads.

"Apparently, she used to not be so bitchy," Ruby Lucas says, "but her boyfriend died a year or so ago after stroking out from heart surgery, and she's been the 'Evil Queen' ever since. Tragic, right?"

"That's so sad," Mary Margaret Blanchard replies. Her previous perkiness from the morning has since evaporated after having to perform sic back-to-back renal exams. "No wonder it seems like she hates the world."

"I mean, my high school boyfriend died, and I'm not a total bitch, so it's not like she should get a total pass," Ruby responds with a shrug before taking a generous bite from her sandwich.

"People deal with grief differently. My parents died my first year at Stanford, and I shut down for a bit," Elsa Arendelle comments. Emma remembers how Elsa had been hanging pictures of her family in her locker that very morning. "People started calling me the 'Ice Queen' because I was apparently so cold to everyone."

"Does everyone here have a tragic backstory?"

Emma listens as her co-workers debate and gossip, doing her best to abate the queasiness rising in her stomach. Is this how they would talk if word got out she slept with Jones? Would they judge her, or share their own inappropriate sex stories?

Emma doesn't want to find out.

-/-

She's barely tossed away her lunch and begun more paperwork when Dr. Jones appears out of practically thin air, his teeth flashing in a wide grin. "Our friend Wendy needs surgery."

"Please tell me you weren't smiling like that when you told her family," Emma replies in a deadpan. He is unfairly hot when he smiles – a thought she certainly shouldn't be thinking – but she doubts Wendy's parents would be fond of said smile when he's delivering the news their daughter needs brain surgery.

"Oh, Swan, that would bad form. I don't do bad form," he explains, schooling his face into a solemn expression. "Besides, my moral code is not up for discussion. I'm here to talk to you. No worries, Swan, it's about the case, not any of the dirty thoughts you might be having."

"You're full of yourself, you know that?"

"I would say that you'd be surprised by the number of people who've said that, but I somehow doubt you would be," he tells her. "Anyway, enough about me, this is about you. And Wendy. You and Wendy. I want you to scrub in with me on her surgery."

Emma's jaw drops. Interns don't scrub into surgeries on the first day. She's too new, too green, and out of the all surgeries she could be asked to scrub in on, it's freaking brain surgery. An adipectomy, sure, but a brain surgery?

"But it's my first day," she argues. She shouldn't be arguing against this. Scrubbing in on a brain surgery is dream, but now she's second-guessing herself.

"And Miss Darling is your patient." Jones replies. "If you don't want to scrub in, fine, but you're the one who wishes to be a surgeon, and that includes performing surgeries."

Emma takes a deep breath. Her first instinct is to run. Her first instinct is always to run – away from uncaring foster parents, away from her feelings, away from hot doctors she meets in a bar. But she's going to be a surgeon. She wants to be a surgeon. She want's to do good, save people.

"Okay, I'm in."

-/-

It's only after he's gone that Emma begins to second-guess herself. From what she's gleaned, none of the other interns have been asked to scrub in on surgeries. She's seen the board, and most of the other attendings have surgeries scheduled for today. But her fellow interns aren't scrubbing in. They're to renal exams, or scut, or working in the clinic.

Emma's the only one with a surgery on the docket – the woman who fucked her attending the night prior.

She feels like she is going to throw up.

-/-

It's Mary Margaret who finds her. Mary Margaret, who stands to the side as Emma pours out the limited contents of her stomach onto the ground. It's Mary Margaret who offers her a bottle of water.

"I heard Dr. Jones asked you to scrub in with him," Mary Margaret says as Emma takes on a long drink from the bottle. "I'm a little jealous."

"Don't be." Emma hands her back the bottle. "I'm not doing it."

"But why? It's brain surgery. You'll be right there when he's cutting into that girl's brain." Emma can hear the incredulity in Mary Margaret's voice. She gets it. If it had been Mary Margaret telling her that she would be bailing on a surgery, Emma would feel the same way.

"It's…complicated," Emma says. Complicated by the fact that it's very likely Dr. Jones wants to get into her pants. Complicated by the fact that he already has, quite thoroughly. Complicated by the fact that if he wasn't her boss, she would almost let him.

Fuck her life.

"I know neuro can be somewhat daunting, so if you're worried—"

"I'm not worried," Emma snaps. Because she isn't worried. Not about the surgery. She knows she'd be able to handle whatever it was that Dr. Jones asked of her in the operating room. Emma is smart, and talented, and is going to be a damn fine doctor. She's not weak, and she doesn't want Mary Margaret to see her as such. "Like I said, it's complicated."

"Okay." Mary Margaret is quiet for a moment, until, "You know, if you want to talk about whatever it is that makes things complicated, you can. I'll listen. We're going to be around one another a lot the next few years, so we might as well rely on each other sooner than later."

Emma doesn't answer, and Mary Margaret leaves.

She's never been good with the friend thing.

-/-

She corners Dr. Jones in a stairwell.

"Why did you ask me to scrub in with you today?" she asks, placing her hands on her hips and doing her absolute best to send him a glare that says she means business. It's probably not professional, but he's not being professional, so Emma reasons it's okay.

What isn't okay is the slow quirk of is brow – did she really think it was unbelievably sexy last night? – and the confusion written across his face. "Because you're a surgical intern, and in order for you to be a surgeon, you need to scrub in on surgeries."

"And that's all? Because here's the thing, buddy, just because I slept with you once, it doesn't mean I'm going to sleep with you again for more surgeries. Nor does it mean that I want surgeries because you want in my pants," she huffs out.

Dr. Jones is quiet for a long moment. Then, he laughs. It's somewhat infuriating, but god, does he have a beautiful laugh. (Another thing to add to the list of things she should not be thinking.) "Swan, lovely as you are, what transpired between us last night has nothing to do with you assisting me later."

"It doesn't?"

"No, it doesn't," his voice turns serious. "Dr. Swan, I looked at your file – top of you class at Dartmouth, glowing recommendations from your professors and supervisors, brilliant test scores. You're seemingly unafraid in the face of adversity or challenge, fiery as you all. Everything I know about you tells me that you'd be a brilliant surgeon. Now you tell me, why wouldn't I want you to scrub in with me?"

Emma opens her mouth, but no words come out. Dr. Jones grins again, his expression smug. She wants to slap it off him, and a not-so-small part wants to kiss it off of him.

"I'll see you in the operating room, Dr. Swan. I'll be the one in the skull-and-crossbones skull cap."

-/-

She participates in a brain surgery, and actual brain surgery. She doesn't do much. She's only an intern, after all, but she's there. She's in the operating room, and she's watching as Dr. Jones drills into an actual living human's head.

And Wendy Darling makes it through the surgery. It's amazing.

Emma doesn't think she's ever felt more alive.

-/-

To Emma's surprise, Mary Margaret is waiting for in the lobby.

"You scrubbed in." If Emma's not mistaken, Mary Margaret almost looks a little proud. She doesn't know why. She doesn't even know why the other woman is still here.

"You waited."

"Well, yeah, that's what friends do," Mary Margaret replies as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. And maybe it is. "And speaking of friends, a few of the other interns are at the Rabbit Hole tonight. I thought I would wait to see if you wanted to join?"

Emma's exhausted. She should go home, go to bed, prepare for tomorrow. But right now, Emma feels alive.

"Sure. Let's go."

-/-

Unlike the night before, Emma doesn't order rum. Instead, she nurses a pint of beer, smiling as Ruby and Elsa take turns draining shots. She laughs. She bonds. And for a moment, Emma feels as if she is fitting in.

It's nice.

"We did it ladies! We survived out first day!" Ruby shouts in jubilation, pumping her first into the air. "We only marginally got our asses kicked by the Evil Queen, Emma over her helped save a girl's life, and we're closing the night with some great drinks."

"You're drunk," Mary Margaret teases, tossing a peanut at Ruby. "You need some water."

"I'll get it," Emma volunteers. She's the one closest to the bar anyway. Besides, though she's enjoying this whole bonding thing, it's still so new. She needs to a moment to catch herself and take the entire day in. It's been a rollercoaster.

At the bar, she waves down the bartender for water. Much to her chagrin, he's taking much longer than he did the night previous.

"Rum again?"

Just as he did last night, he slides onto next her. Emma rolls her eyes.

"Water, actually." She tosses her hair over her shoulder, indicating to the table behind her where Elsa, Mary Margaret, and Ruby are conversing animatedly. Dr. Jones hums in amusement at her answer.

"I found something out today," he says. His expression is dangerous. "Did you know that the hospital holds no fraternization policy?"

Emma eyes him skeptically. "It doesn't?"

"Not a such, no. From what I can tell, anyone within the hospital can fraternize – assuming it isn't a patient, of course."

"Of course."

The bartender brings the glasses of water just then. She manages all four of the glasses, the years she spent serving in undergrad aiding her.

"Have fun with your friends, Swan. I'll see you soon," he tells her as she goes. Emma thinks she can hear a hint of promise in his voice.

It worries her how much she likes it.

She's screwed.


	2. The Plane Crash

There is a plane crash.

The story dominates the news. The plane had been a chartered flight, carrying six doctors up the coast to assist another hospital's surgical team in separating conjoined twins. The doctors never made it. Currently, teams are combing through the New England forests searching for the downed plane. Newscasters speak hopefully of finding survivors, but it's doubtful. Hardly anyone survives a plane crash.

She watches the news over Chinese takeout, alone in her small studio. As a doctor, she knows how easily one's life can stop on a dime. Since starting her internship, she's done the whole ER thing. Car crashes, heart attacks, sudden falls. She's been there waiting as paramedics drive up, on for their patients to be called dead on arrival. People doing their jobs, or carrying about their days, only for things to go horribly wrong and die. She knows all of this.

She's always been drawn to the morbid - she's a doctor, after all - but this story sticks with her in the way others do not. She thinks it has something to do with the fact that the passengers were doctors. She thinks it could be her someday, maybe, flying across the country to perform some insane surgical feat. She thinks about their families, their friends, the people they are leaving behind. Emma even thinks about the conjoined twins, whose surgery will continue to be delayed.

If Emma dies, she wouldn't have much unfinished business like the plane crash victims. She's barely into her internship. She doesn't have any real cases. No conjoined twins to separate. She doesn't even have a significant other to leave behind. Not even a cat in need of being fed.

It's a little bit depressing.

-/-

Her internship is exhausting and exhilarating, but most of all, it is all-consuming. It surprises Emma how an 80-hour-workweek can both drag on, but also speed by in nothing more than a blink of eye. It's part patient work, part paperwork, and a whole lot of discovering just where to go and what to do, with residents and attendings both looking at her and her fellow interns like they are idiots.

It could always be worse, though. She hasn't almost killed anyone. Their second week, Mary Margaret nearly had a patient bleed out while assisting with an appendectomy. Problems arise during surgery - that's a fact - but generally not something like an appendectomy. Thankfully, the general surgery attending present, Dr. Nemo, had stepped in to pull the patient through.

Mary Margaret's near failure had served as a reminder, though: they're still interns, and they have a load to learn.

-/-

The worst part of her internship is the elevators.

Emma hates elevators, and if given the chance, she does everything possible to avoid them.

It's a newfound thing, this whole disliking of elevators. Prior to her internship, she actually never held any strong opinions regarding them. They had always just be there, existing as they do. But here, here she hates elevators.

Because of him .

Because an elevator is a small, enclosed space that she is forced to share with him. It's not so bad when there are a bunch of other people in it with them, unless she somehow gets shuffled next to him, and can feel the heat radiating off of him, smell him, and feel his warm breath on the back of her neck, making her think very impure thoughts.

It's worse, though, when it's just the two of them. Him and her in a tiny enclosed space, in what feels like the slowest elevator to ever exist. It's those moments when he looks at her with that smug sort of half-smirk, one eyebrow quirked as if he can read those very impure thoughts that flicker through her mind whenever he's around. Because here's the thing: even though Emma Swan is a one night kind of girl, she's finding herself increasingly in want of another round with Killian Jones.

Which is a problem, because he's her boss. Well, her boss's boss, as he likes to remind her, but he's high enough on the foods chain that it still counts. And though the hospital has no fraternization policy, a fact of which he also likes to remind her, sleeping with him (again) would still be wrong on some level...right? Emma remembers the ways everyone talked about the girls who slept with their professors in undergrad and medical school. Sluts. Whores. Every dirty word one would call a woman. And though Emma never called them those names, she was still suspect of them to a small degree, because everyone knew sleeping with a professor was a "not good" thing. Just like sleeping with an attending.

So, no, she can't sleep with Killian Jones because that would be a very bad, not good thing. No matter how hot he looks in his scrubs, no matter how nice he smells.

No matter how much she wants to.

-/-

It's easy to not think about her fucked up sex life while she is working, so Emma enjoys the hell that is life as an intern more than she otherwise would. And as much as it sucks being on Dr. Whale's service for week, where she does more coffee runs than actual doctoring, it's better than sitting around thinking about Dr. Jones, or being constantly around him doing neuro consults like Ruby is this week.

Only, that's entirely a lie. Because she actually enjoys neuro more than plastics, and Dr. Jones is a much better teacher than Dr. Whale. And a better doctor, to be honest, but she's not going to tell Whale that. Or Jones. Or, well, anyone. Maybe the interns, because they all sort of bitch about that sort of thing, and Emma is sure Elsa would agree. Despite considering plastics as a speciality, she has complained the entire week prior about the Whale's insanity and general asshole demeanor.

But, for the most part, when Emma is working, she doesn't think about Jones or how she wants to bite his collarbone.

Again.

It would be so much easier if she hadn't already slept him. Then, she would just be able to consider him a hot boss, and she could imagine him during one-on-one time with her vibrator without it feeling weird. Because Emma knows how he kisses, and how he looks under those scrubs. She knows how well he uses his tongue and teeth and cock, and God, she wants it all again. Because the sex was good. The sex was incredibly good, mind-numbingly good, good in a way she didn't think was possible with one night stands.

But that's Killian Jones: Neuro God, Sex God...and her boss.

If she keeps repeating it in her head, maybe she will be able to convince herself anything more would be a very, terrible idea.

-/-

She finds herself at the Rabbit Hole on a Thursday, just as alone as the first night she had visited. Elsa and Ruby and both working late nights, and Mary Margaret had wanted to turn in early, leaving Emma to herself. She doesn't necessarily want to be at bar, but there are people here, and it feels better than sitting in her apartment.

She sits at the bar, swirling her rum in its glass, not really drinking. She's always been a solitary sort of person, so she wonders now why the loneliness is getting to her. Is it the demands of the internship? The desire to unwind with a loved on at the end of a particularly heinous shift? Ruby's grandmother owns a diner not too far from the hospital, and Mary Margaret's family doesn't live too far away, either. Even Elsa calls her sister often. Who does Emma have to call or visit?

No one.

"You're supposed to drink that, you know."

"Seriously?" Emma groans, turning to see Killian Jones behind her.

He slides onto the empty barstool next to her, and waves the bartender down for a drink. His drink is brought quickly, and Killian raises the glass toward her. "You see this is a glassful of rum." He takes a drink. "And that is what you do with it."

"I know how to drink," she replies coolly, and just to prove him wrong, she takes a long pull of her rum, almost draining the entire glass. "What do you want, Jones?"

"I want to know why a lovely lass such as yourself is drinking alone on Thursday night," he replies matter-of-factly. He looks at her in the eyes, and Emma wants to shrink away from him. She also wants to kiss him. Instead, she settles on not moving one way or another.

"Have you ever thought about dying?" she asks him. She doesn't know why she's entertaining him, except for the fact that he's here and he's someone to talk to. He's better than no one. "Like, have you ever thought what would happen if a semi came out of nowhere and hit your car?"

He studies his drink, and takes a sip before answering. "Have a thought about being hit by a semi? No. Have a thought about dying? Yes. What brings this on?"

"Honestly? All this plane crash talk on a news. It was a bunch of doctors, you know."

"Relating to the passengers, are we?"

"A bit," Emma answers. She doesn't know why it's so easy talking to him. It's just easy being around him, and it feels as if he's chipping away at her walls without even really trying. She shouldn't like this, because it's dangerous, but the words continue to fall. "I keep thinking, what if it was me on that plane? Is that crazy?"

"It's not crazy," he replies, and Emma knows he means it. "So what do you conclude?"

"Huh?"

"What's your conclusion to your 'what if'? What if you were on the plane, Swan?" Jones asks, quirking an eyebrow. He rests his chin on the heel of his palm, obviously interested in her answer. She debates telling him, but she's tired and it's Thursday, and for the first time in awhile, she doesn't feel like she's alone.

"Nothing. Nothing would happen," she says before finishing her drink. "I'd have nothing left behind. No one would miss me."

"That's a lie," he tells her, his voice stern. He sits down his glass, and inches toward her. "That's a lie, Swan."

"Is it?"

"Yes, it is," he says.

"And why is that?" Emma slides from her stool, and moves between his spread knees. She grabs his glass, and takes a sip.

"Because I would miss you."

She shouldn't kiss him.

But she does.

-/-

The carpet is rough against her back, and his fingers squeeze against hers as he fucks into her. She wraps her legs around his back, shifting the angle and causing him to groan against her throat. He bites at her neck in retaliation, their mutual give and take driving them to pleasurable heights.

She comes first, biting her lip to stay as silent as possible. He follows not long after, gasping her name as if it is his benediction. After, she allows him lead her back into his bed where they curl into one another.

This time, she waits until he falls to sleep before he leaves.

-/-

She's distracted the next day at work. Whale chews her out for stumbling over her patient reports, and Regina tells her that she looks sloppy.

"Patients don't want their doctors to look sloppy, Dr. Swan."

Emma spends her break hiding out in the on call room, hating herself, Jones, and the stupid passengers on the downed plane. She shouldn't have kissed him the previous night at the bar. She shouldn't have fallen for his stupid line about missing her if she died, because he's only known her for all of three weeks.

For a brief moment, she'd been happy. She enjoyed being around him, enjoyed kissing him. Even when he had held her after, she'd felt warm, safe. She hadn't wanted to leave him. But she had. And in the light of the next morning, all the reasons why they were wrong and all the reasons how she could be hurt came rushing back in full force.

Emma had thought she had learned from her mistakes, but apparently not. She thinks back to when she was seventeen and stupid, falling for Neal just because he was someone who understood the broken lost girl thing and helped her steal a car. And sleeping with Jones is no different. Only it's worse because she's put her entire career on the line - something she's fought desperately for since Neal left her life in shambles - all because she felt a need for affection.

God, she's an idiot.

-/-

"Are you okay?"

Mary Margaret has this magical ability to appear out of nowhere when Emma is feeling her lowest. It's a little bit annoying, but sweet at the same time. Emma wonders if this is how it feels to have a mother, to have someone check up on you have a bad day, or a series of bad days for that matter.

"Can we not do that thing? The thing where I tell you I'm fine, but you don't believe me, so you needle me until I either give in or storm away, because I really don't want to storm away right now," Emma tells her. She's spent twenty-five years without a mother. She can go a few more. She waits for Mary Margaret to protest, because it's a Mary Margaret sort of thing to do, but instead the other woman remains silent. "Look, I don't mean to be bitchy-"

"You aren't being bitchy," Mary Margaret cuts in. At Emma's dubious expression, she corrects herself. "Okay, so you're being a bit bitchy, but we all deal with our things in our own ways. I was just trying to think of something to distract you with, if you would like. Something totally not about you."

"As long as it's not about plane crashes or assholes, go for it," Emma says with a chuckle.

"So, I'm thinking I'm really liking pediatric surgery. It's just incredibly fulfilling to work with the kids…"

Emma listens to Mary Margaret prattle on about her cases and the new pediatric attending. It doesn't exactly make her feel better, but it doesn't make her feel worse either.

It's a start.

-/-

It's at an elevator when she seems him again.

He has the audacity to look hurt, and it's that which sets her blood ablaze.

"That was unfair of you, you know," she tells him as she presses the button to stop the elevator. "You shouldn't have done that, take advantage of me, that is. I was doing fine before you walked into the bar."

"You know, other people will need to use this elevator," he says with a sigh. Even so, he makes no move to resume it. "From what I recall, you kissed me first. Both times, actually."

"You should have stopped it."

"Many times last night, I asked you if it was what you wanted," he replies, a hint of anger in his voice. "You said yes each time."

She wants to argue with him. She really, really does. But he's right. As much as she doesn't want him to be, he's right. He'd asked her in the bar if she wanted to continue. He'd asked her outside of his apartment, and later, inside. She'd said yes each time. "I want you." Isn't that what she'd whispered to him before drawing down for a kiss?

Unfortunately, even if Emma is the type of person who's willing to admit she's wrong to herself, she's also the type who won't admit it to others. So, she doubles down.

"Why'd you say you missed me? You barely know me. You can't miss me. Were you just trying to get into my pants? Manipulate the sad, lonely intern?"

"I told you that I would miss you because I was being honest. The length of time we've known one another doesn't change that," he tells her. He crosses his arms over his chest. "And I do know something about you, love. You're a bit of an open book, you know."

"What does that even mean?"

Before she can answer, both of their pagers begin to buzz.

-/-

There are a number of doctors waiting, each practically humming with excitement, when they get down to the pit.

"What's going on?" Emma asks Mary Margaret, who is standing by an eager-looking Elsa.

"The doctors from the plane crash," Mary Margaret explains. "They found them, and they're bring them here ."


End file.
